BOOK REVIEW
Riding a tiger through a Chinese brothel Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China by Tiantian
Zheng
Reviewed by David Wilson
The sex workers she mixed with called her "Glasses" and a "college student". At
least initially, the rural migrants refused to believe that Tiantian Zheng
possessed the depth to understand their lives - especially their inner turmoil.
Zheng did her best to fit in more and learn, embedding herself in a karaoke bar
in her birthplace, Dalian - a northeastern Chinese seaport of over six million
people. Over the course of her two-year research stint, Zheng faced many of the
dangers the hostesses
did and went on an emotional rollercoaster, discovering much about the whole
Dalian bar girl scene.
Her ethnographic study of her sleazy stint makes for heavy reading, however.
If only the author, who has a PhD from Yale, had concentrated more on telling
the story instead of freighting it with cerebral baggage. Some of the prose in Red
Lights is so turgid that it borders on unreadable. In one particularly
excruciating passage, Zheng makes this dazzling assertion: "The use of clothing
- that is, the wearing of clothes - is undeniably an individual affair: clothes
in general can only be worn on one body at a time."
When China's answer to Shere Hite departs from laboring the obvious, she often
heads in the opposite direction, embracing baroque obscurity. Take a deep
breath and try to read the following sentence that crops up in a paragraph
about the meaning of the hostesses' "cultural strategies".
"In this sense," Zheng writes, "their very agency paradoxically binds and
limits them by reinscribing and reproducing the hegemonic state discourse that
legitimizes and naturalizes the docile virgin/promiscuous whore split image."
Elsewhere in her jargon-heavy tract, Zheng - associate professor of
anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland - lives up to her
college student label. Her explanations of why men go to brothels have an
embarrassingly overwrought born-yesterday feel.
The reader may picture the "worn-shoe" women in her crosshairs laughing at her
talk of men redefining their sexuality aggressively in response to the
emasculating effect of Maoism. Zheng seems to forget that she is appraising the
oldest profession, which has always been messy, rather than some curious new
trend that is tricky to fathom.
The Byzantine elaboration that bogs down the book is all the more galling,
indeed it borders on grotesque for one simple reason: Zheng's subjects clearly
lead brutally harsh, gritty lives unsuited to such a highly rarefied, technical
analysis. The excessive intellectualization undermines the reportage, which,
redemptively, is solid.
Despite the pretension, Zheng deserves huge credit for truly riding a tiger.
Her intimate research could be deeply disturbing. Often, she had to witness
shocking scenes, not least of which was vomiting hostesses unable to cope with
the amount of alcohol they were obliged to drink to keep pace with the
procession of clients. Zheng shows what a truly unglamorous job hostessing is.
Hostessing is also far more risky than the fixed smiles might suggest. During
one police raid, like her quasi-colleagues, Zheng had to run and cower under a
bed to escape detection. During a gangster raid, she had her arm grabbed by one
felon who started dragging her upstairs toward a private room where women were
sometimes raped.
The doorman and the manager stopped the thug in his tracks by telling him that
Zheng was their friend. "This saved me from imminent danger, but the fear
remained," she writes, devoted to exposing the breadth of the savagery that
goes on behind the glittering malls of northern China's answer to Hong Kong.
The degree of degradation that the hostesses undergo may be even worse than the
darkest scenarios imputed by a reasonably informed observer. The hostesses
cannot trust each other or their appointed guardians.
Imagine having to work in the shadow of Bing the bouncer. So unlike his benign
famous namesake, the Academy Award-winning American popular singer, Bing works
at a filthy "low-tier" karaoke bar called Romantic Dream. During Zheng's
bizarre fieldwork, she witnessed countless bloody fights between the Romantic
Dream hard man and gangsters, clients and passersby. "I saw Bing and bar
waiters throw heavy stones and chairs at clients and some passersby until blood
streamed down their faces," Zheng recounts.
For killing and severely injuring many men, Bing was once sentenced to death
but saved by the bar owner who paid a mint for him to be freed from prison.
Without Bing, the bar would be bedlam, forcing the hostesses to run for their
lives.
On the one hand, Bing is their knight in shining armor. On the other, he is an
ogre, happy to maul and rape them when the mood takes him.
But if the men exposed in Red Lights appear monstrous, the hostesses
appear little better. Although impressively talented at acting and so stylish
that they set trends, they seem charmless - ice queens fixated on status and
money.
In the coterie of the hostesses, according to Zheng, conversation centers on
how to extract the most and expend the least. Talking about emotional
involvement without compensation is a taboo enforced by ostracizing.
With very few exceptions, the hostesses seem severely in need of tender loving
care - or just a trickle of warmth. True, the money they make is the envy of
many a toiling male peasant. Still, the income hardly seems to compensate for
the abuse best summed up by poor hostess Min. Raped by a client, Min relates
one of the most telling stories in this distressing book that offers scant hope
- very few hostesses break out, move on and make it.
After the rape, Min recounts, she became pregnant and considered herself to be
his. She believed him when he promised her that he would marry her. Wildly in
love, she yearned for the wedding.
Until one day the rosy bubbles built
up in my dream were crumbled and collapsed. That day, I was carrying a dish
from the kitchen upstairs to attend to the guests. The moment I stepped on the
upper level, I caught my lover sitting at a table with a woman on his lap
flirting and laughing.
I could not believe my eyes: is this the man who says to me every day that he
loves me and he cannot wait to marry me? I felt the whole world turning in a
whirl in front of me. I did not know when I dropped the plates and fainted onto
the floor. That accident killed the baby in my belly and, with it, my romantic
dreams.
Her harrowingly plain vignette says it all. What a
pity the book is marred by acres of egghead gobbledygook. Otherwise, Red Lights
might deservedly find a wide audience beyond academia.
Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China by Tiantian
Zheng. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8166-5903-6. Price
$22.50 (paper), 304 pages.
David Wilson is an Anglo-Australian recovering print journalist with a
special interest in Asia. His work has previously appeared everywhere from the
Malaysia Star to the Times Literary Supplement and International Herald
Tribune.
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If only the author, who has a PhD from Yale, had concentrated more on telling
the story instead of freighting it with cerebral baggage. Some of the prose in Red
Lights is so turgid that it borders on unreadable. In one particularly
excruciating passage, Zheng makes this dazzling assertion: "The use of clothing
- that is, the wearing of clothes - is undeniably an individual affair: clothes
in general can only be worn on one body at a time."
